Quick question: Do i need these use flags?

Message

danvari · Post by **danvari** » Wed Oct 28, 2009 6:54 am

Hey!

I want to clean up my system and now i want to know if i need these flags anymore:

python, perl, xml

Is it generally a bad idea to disable them? I would say i do not need them, i do not need python or perl bindings at all (maybe for 1 or 2 packages i need them) and do not need xml (configs? than i need it for openbox).
How do i get to know for example what "xml" does for wine?

aceFruchtsaft · Post by **aceFruchtsaft** » Wed Oct 28, 2009 8:02 am

I think you can safely get rid of USE="perl". I've had all my Gentoo systems running with -perl for years. Nevertheless there are be about two dozen Perl-related ebuilds installed.

Don't know about the other two.

Post by **toralf** » Wed Oct 28, 2009 8:21 am

ALl 3 are set within default profile (10.0 for a desktop system) - therefore they do not needed to be set explicitely.

aidanjt · Post by **aidanjt** » Wed Oct 28, 2009 8:31 am

If you set it globally you should be alright, any packages which have hard dependencies on those scripting engines will pull them in by themselves (e.g. portage is dependant on python, so you'll always have python installed). USE flags should only enable/disable optional features.

Your mileage may vary though, disabling profile-set flags can sometimes have some headaches attached, so if you do disable them you may want to watch out for possible unintended breakage.

danvari · Post by **danvari** » Wed Oct 28, 2009 9:01 am

yes thank you. so i will disable them and only enable them for packages that really depend on it (i think libxml2 need +python because without it wicd will not work anymore).